Samantha’s Christmas story

In mid-November* I invited you to send your Christmas vignettes by December 10 and promised I’d select one to publish here the week before Christmas.

Your responses were fun, and I send a big thanks to everyone who sent a story.

I’ve decided to publish four vignettes, not one, and today you get to read Samantha White’s story. It will give you a big smile. I wish I could have known her mother. You’ll see why when you read this story.

My family was Orthodox Jewish, but my mother, bless her, knew that Christmas was about more than the birth of Jesus, it was also about light breaking through the darkness, bringing peace and love and joy, and she was determined that her children would not be "passed over" when light, joy, and love were being dispensed to all the other children in our overwhelmingly Gentile neighborhood.

So, amidst the observance of Hanukkah and all the other business of December, every Christmas Eve Dad brought two wooden orange crates up from the cellar and nailed a plywood plank across the top, joining them into something resembling a fireplace.

My little brother and I watched while Mom covered it with crepe paper printed with a design of bricks, marveling as the boxes took on the realistic look of a fireplace. We tacked a couple of socks to the "mantel" and Dad carried the "fireplace" into the living room. Then my brother and I went to bed to await Santa Claus's visit to our house.

Now, we absolutely knew that the fireplace was made of orange crates and that we didn't have a chimney. But we also knew that this was Christmas Eve, and Santa did not discriminate among good little children on the basis of the religion their families practiced.

So on Christmas morning we bounded to the living room to find our proof that goodness was rewarded: gifts of toys and books, with tags reading, "From Santa Claus" were piled in front of the fireplace, and soon the living room was strewn with torn red and green gift wrapping paper and ribbons, and we were happily at play.

Since Christmas Day was also a secular holiday, Dad stayed home from work and my grandparents came to visit. Before they arrived, however, we all bustled to clear away the traces of Santa's visit—the tell-tale debris cleaned up, the "fireplace" dismantled, the crepe paper folded and put away, and the orange crates returned to the cellar, until the following year. When my grandparents arrived for dinner, no traces of our revelry remained.

My brother and I never left the faith of our ancestors, nor forgot our religion, because of Santa's visits to our house. If anything, it helped us understand how much it means to share joy at the darkest, coldest time of year, and to be with family, and to believe in rewards for being good. As we grew older, we learned that we could give as well as receive, and that in giving lay the even greater joy.

Now, don’t you, too, wish you could have known Samantha’s mother? What a spunky gal she must have been!

I recall my sweet grandmother making a makeshift fireplace with crepe paper printed to look like bricks—what a hoot!

Samantha, author of Someone To Talk To: Finding Peace, Purpose, and Joy After Tragedy and Loss, is a psychotherapist and Positive Aging Coach.* Click here to see her brand new blog, Peace, Purpose, and Joy.

Wednesday I’ll share another story with you. Will it be Diana’s? Or Kathy’s? Or Nancy’s? I’m not telling. You’ll have to come back!

*Links and references:

Send me your Christmas vignettes,

http://spiritualmemoirs101.blogspot.com/2011/11/send-me-your-christmas-vignettes.html

Samantha M. White, MSW, LICSW
http://www.someonetotalktothebook.com/
http://www.samanthawhite.com/

Samantha’s blog, Peace, Purpose, and Joy, http://www.peacepurposeandjoy.blogspot.com